Developing Your Emotional Health: The Compact Guide

This practical, empowering guide provides performers and creatives with a toolkit of techniques to improve, manage and maintain good emotional wellbeing – helping you navigate and overcome the pressures and demands of a career in the arts.

Inside, you’ll find key, evidence-based concepts and ideas about emotional health, as well as the benefits of taking a holistic approach to your brain, imagination and body. There are dozens of creative exercises and meditations to help you build resilience, develop your emotional intelligence, reframe negative thoughts, stay motivated, and embrace change when it comes. You’ll also discover strategies for tackling auditions, preparing for performances and coping with periods of unemployment, plus guidance on creating your own personalised emotional health plan.

Invaluable for anyone working in the creative industries, this book will equip you to assume responsibility for your own emotional wellbeing, and pursue your passion whilst still enjoying a life of fulfilment and satisfaction.

The Compact Guides are pocket-sized introductions for actors and theatremakers, each tackling a key topic in a clear and comprehensive way. Written by industry professionals with extensive hands-on experience of their subject, they provide you with maximum information in minimum time.

Andy Barker, Brian Cooley and Beth Wood have all worked in the arts in various roles, including as actors, writers, directors and stage managers. Together, Andy and Brian run Mind Fitness, an organisation dedicated to developing mental health and wellbeing and business effectiveness, and Beth is Artistic Director of Prospero Theatre Company.